Facebook (News - Alert) might not be loved by everyone on the Internet, but one can’t really argue that it doesn’t have a successful business plan. The company has recently purchased Storylane.
The social networking site has become a juggernaut in its market because of the way it does business. The firm’s approach to its business has been so impressive at times that companies that have nothing to do with social media have taken it upon themselves to copy Facebook’s approach.
One of the ways the site has managed to stay so successful is in how it has managed to make companies that might have been even minor competitors go away. Facebook’s purchasing of Storylane is a testament to this.
Storylane was a relatively young social media site that allowed its users to connect to one another by posting stories it had written. While there isn’t a whole lot of detail surrounding the terms of this particular sale, Storylane CEO Jonathan Gheller announced that his site had been purchased on his company’s blog.
"After a lot of discussions with Facebook about how our teams might work together to have even greater impact,” Gheller wrote, “We are announcing today that the Storylane team will be joining Facebook."
Facebook confirmed that it had bought the site later and announced that the five-person staff of Storylane would be joining the social media giant’s Timeline (News - Alert) team.
The Storylane site was quite young, having just launched in October. When it did launch, the stated goal was trying to build a “library of human experiences” by having people share stories from their lives. The Storylane team has said that they are working to put a tool together that will allow users who did in fact post stories of their lives to the site, to post those stories on other sites so they aren’t lost.
As part of the deal, said Gheller, Facebook will not get any of the data or operations on the site. That means that Storylane users won’t become Facebook members against their will.